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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/30041457">Our Paper Ring</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamalovesherbagels/pseuds/mamalovesherbagels'>mamalovesherbagels</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>9-1-1 (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>but chim is in that coma, essentially rebar redone with maddie instead of tatianna, hi so i'm evil, self loathing for bad things happen bingo, so it's not her fault and she's not a bitch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 01:33:53</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,072</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/30041457</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/mamalovesherbagels/pseuds/mamalovesherbagels</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>“Wake up, please, please wake up. You have to wake up.”</p><p>Her pleading goes unanswered, it always goes unanswered. It’s only been two days and yet it’s been the longest two days of her life. “There’s time,” everyone tells her, well, everyone except Hen who can’t look her in the eye and hasn’t said a word to her since she arrived at the hospital. She can’t blame her, though.</p><p>No matter how much Hen hates her, she’s sure she hates herself even more.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Maddie Buckley/Howie "Chimney" Han</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Bad Things Happen Bingo [7]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048141</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>18</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Our Paper Ring</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Wake up, please, please wake up. You have to wake up.”</p><p>Her pleading goes unanswered, it always goes unanswered. It’s only been two days and yet it’s been the longest two days of her life. “There’s time,” everyone tells her, well, everyone except Hen who can’t look her in the eye and hasn’t said a word to her since she arrived at the hospital. She can’t blame her, though.</p><p>No matter how much Hen hates her, she’s sure she hates herself even more.</p><p>He drove poorly, but it’s all her fault. She’s the one who had broken his heart, that had put the tears in his eyes that probably blurred his version, who put the shock through his body that likely rendered him unable to focus. He hemorrhaged in surgery after having a piece of rebar go through one side of his skull, through his brain, and then out the other, and now he’s in a coma and might never wake up.</p><p>And even if he does wake up, she knows the likely prognosis. He’s unlikely to survive, and even more unlikely to be the <i>same</i> person as he was before if he does. She feels sick, but she knows there’s nothing in her stomach to throw up because she hasn’t eaten anything since he ran out of her apartment crying and she then received the worst phone call she’s ever been a part of, and she’d spent over ten years with Doug screaming at her through the phone.</p><p>It was those stupid fucking flowers.</p><p>Her favorite, she hadn’t been lying when she told him that purple tulips were her favorite.</p><p>They’re not anymore; ruined in one night.</p><p>She told Chimney to propose, she hinted and hinted that despite the trauma of her first marriage, that she was ready to marry the man she’s so desperately in love with until the hints went unnoticed and she realized she needed to be blunt. She needed him to buy a ring and ask her because she knows she’s the one that had been holding them back. And he had grinned and cried and promised her that he’d make it a surprise, but not a surprise <i>too</i> far off in the future.</p><p>She hadn’t been lying, Doug, awful as he was, hadn’t ruined purple tulips for her. She just hadn’t mentioned that Doug used them in his proposal to her and poor Chimney, kneeling down on their living room floor with candles on the coffee table and bouquets of purple tulips… it’s not his fault that she flashed back. It’s not his fault that she panicked.</p><p>It was like she wasn’t even in the room anymore, like he wasn’t in there either. She wasn’t talking to <i>him</i> when she kept whimpering that no, that she couldn’t. She was talking to the stupid, forever unrepentant ghost of her dead husband who had picked the world’s worse moment to reappear in front of her.</p><p>But by the time she forced herself back into the present, she couldn’t explain it to Chimney because he was gone, his phone and keys swept up from off kitchen counters and the ring on the table. She called him, and called him again and again but it all kept going straight to voicemail and she feels sick again wondering at what point it shifted from him not answering because he didn’t want to and him not answering because he <i>couldn’t</i>.</p><p>She had told him to propose and she had led him to believe that she was rejecting him.</p><p>Doug hadn’t ruined the flowers for her, but she sure had.</p><p>No matter how many times Buck and Bobby remind her that trauma is not linear and there’s no way she could have known she would’ve reacted like that and that she needed to tell Chimney to propose without flowers, it just feels hollow. If she could just be <i>normal</i> they’d be happily celebrating their engagement right now, instead him lying unconscious in a hospital bed and her sitting at his side, twisting the ring on her finger because she hates herself so much that it feels like it doesn’t belong there, that she’s not worthy of this expression of his love.</p><p>“I love you,” she whispers, “please wake up.”</p><p>Again nothing but the beeping of the medical equipment in response. Hen is sat in a chair at the otherside of his bed and she still won’t make eye contact with her and still won’t say anything, to her or to Chimney. She just sits there and stares blankly down at her best friend.</p><p>Maddie did this to her. And to Chimney.</p><p>It doesn’t matter that deep, deep down she knows his car accident isn’t her fault, no logic can peek through the overwhelming feeling of guilt over the fact that if she hadn’t broken his heart, he wouldn’t have been on the road at that time and wouldn’t have been driving so recklessly.</p><p>(Athena tells her over and over again that until Chimney wakes up, they can’t know for sure if he was distracted while driving but she knows he had to have been, because who wouldn’t? And she wants to scream and cry and throw something at the wall at everyone’s blind optimism that Chimney is even going to wake up at all. She at least favors Hen’s total silence over everyone else’s flimsy reassurances.)</p><p>(And if Eddie tells her one more time that she’ll get the chance to explain it all to him she might just break the window of his hospital room and let herself fall out of it.)</p><p>She fiddles with her engagement ring another time until the guilt makes it feel as if it’s burning her skin and she takes it off, shoving it into her pocket. </p><p>She looks up at the ceiling for a moment, the lights stinging her eyes before she takes a shaky breath, bringing her eyes over to the woman who had once adored her and had been overjoyed when Chimney had taken her ring shopping with him. Probably so excited to be his best man only for the woman who had told him to propose to reject him, even if it was accidental…</p><p>“Hen,” she forces herself to say, knowing that if she doesn’t say it now, she never will, “Hen, I-I know you hate me and believe me, I do, too. But… if he doesn’t make it… H-Hen, I think I’m pregnant.”</p>
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